source : the age
As police investigate an alleged sexual assault involving Sydney Swans players, and in the week after a survey found 78 per cent of Australian teachers had experienced misogyny at school, Nationals leader Matt Canavan went on national television to unmask the root cause of the country’s boy problem.
Boys, Canavan said, are “sick and tired of getting lectures about how bad men are at school”. They feel “patronised, not cherished”. The solution, he argued, is more male teachers and less “feminisation of the curriculum”.
It was those pesky women.
The first two factors I mention in that opening are matters of fact and evidence. The third came from a man who describes himself as “a father of four boys” as if that constitutes expertise.
By the following morning, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor had effectively endorsed Canavan’s position by declining to disagree with the call for more male teachers, accusing some teachers of “running agendas” and also offering his own children’s experience as his thesis on the subject.
Similar to how a broken clock is right twice a day, Canavan did have one thing right in his misinformed rant. We do, desperately, need more male teachers.
The decline in number of male primary school teacher numbers in this country is alarming. In the 1950s, about 41 per cent of primary teachers were male. Today that figure has fallen to 18 per cent for the first time in history.
I can speak directly to why we struggle to attract and retain good men in primary teaching – because I was one of them. I began my career as an early childhood teacher. I was 193 centimetres – still am – and working with four-year-olds. I was also proud of every minute of it.
What I was less proud of was the version of myself that learnt to deflect the pub question – “so what do you do?” – with some vague answer designed to avoid the raised eyebrows that typically followed the truth.
The three Ps were alive and well in every social circle I moved through: the assumption that a male primary teacher must be one of three things – a principal, a PE teacher, or something altogether more defamatory.
As I wrote in this masthead in 2023, that stigma is real, it is persistent and it is the single most significant barrier keeping good men out of early childhood and primary education in this country.
None of it – not one part of it – has anything to do with the curriculum being too feminine.
Dr Stephanie Wescott, whose Duty of Care report was released by Monash University last week, is direct on this point: there is simply no evidence that women’s presence in education is the problem, and no evidence that recruiting more male teachers is, by itself, a solution to misogynistic behaviour among students.
The research on why men leave primary teaching tells a completely different story – one that Canavan shows no sign of having read.
Dr Vaughan Cruickshank, who has spent years studying male teacher attrition, identifies three consistent barriers: the fear of false accusation when a male teacher touches a distressed child, the social isolation of being the only man in a staff room of 20 women, and the disproportionate expectation – placed on male teachers by leaders and parents alike – that they will personally manage every difficult, aggressive or dysregulated boy in the school.
These are cultural and structural problems requiring cultural and structural solutions. And they are made worse, not better, when a senator goes on telly and informs the country that primary school teaching has been captured by militant feminists.
Canavan and Taylor are telling potential male teachers that primary school teaching is a feminised space – it’s contested territory, not a meaningful career. He amplifies every raised eyebrow, every pub comment, every insinuation that there must be something odd about a bloke who wants to work with children.
If either political leader genuinely wants more male teachers in Australian schools, they have chosen the single most effective way of ensuring we won’t get them.
Wescott’s Duty of Care report found 78 per cent of Australian teachers have observed or experienced sexism or misogyny at school, with half saying it is increasing, 95 per cent believing at least some of their students access manosphere content, and 70 per cent having noticed manosphere ideas directly influencing student attitudes and behaviour in the past year.
Those teachers are overwhelmingly women. They are already on the front line of a genuine cultural emergency, without adequate support or recognition, and now a senator has decided it’s their fault.
Australian Olympian Dan Collins, one of the more “manly” men I know, made a pointed observation about the absence of masculine role models. He concluded that the Sydney Swans’ problem is not that their culture is too masculine, as has widely been the accusation. Collins says they don’t have anywhere near enough masculinity. Not one “man” in that group appears to have had the cojones to insist that the alleged behaviour was not what men do.
The men Australian schools need are the ones Collins is describing – those who insist, by their presence and their conduct, that it’s unacceptable to blame women for the faults of men.
I’ve worked alongside such men and tried to be one of them. They are not deterred by a feminist curriculum – whatever on earth that is. They are deterred by a culture that treats their presence as suspicious.
We know how to build schools that attract and keep those men – schools where every adult is valued, trusted and supported.
These are schools where the culture makes good behaviour possible for children because it has first made it possible for staff. That work is unglamorous, slow and has nothing to do with anything Canavan said on morning TV.
Adam Voigt is a former teacher, principal and the founder and CEO of Real Schools.
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Adam Voigt is a former principal and founder and CEO of Real Schools.
